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How to sell a sitcom

This article was taken from the April issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online

So: you're a pretty funny person, you've seen My Family and you know for sure you could do better than that, and you've got a brilliant idea for a sitcom.

Now you can sit back while television companies compete to see who can pour the most money in your lap, yes? Weirdly, no. Lucy Lumsden, Sky1 head of comedy, notes that TV is in a cautious phase: "Commissioning editors rarely take ideas from writers without a track record."What to do?

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Simon Blackwell has been a writer on Peep Show, The Old Guys and The Thick Of It (as well as its cinema spin-off, In The Loop); his own sitcom is in development.

His advice: "Try to get yourself known writing other things. Write sketches, write gags, links -- whatever you can get paid for."

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Don't, Blackwell says, get too hung up on the basic idea -- "whether your sitcom is set in a submarine, or a hat shop, or a lighthouse, or a brothel... Steptoe isn't about the junk-dealing business, Frasier isn't about a radio station. They're about family relationships."

You want to be original, but start by copying the old masters:

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Lumsden gets new writers to practise by scripting an episode of their favourite sitcom. Script isn't everything, though: Joanna Scanlan, cowriter and star of the nursing comedy Getting On and writer of episodes of Byker Grove and My Parents Are Aliens, has noticed a new trend: "Commissioners who can't even read a script. They can't pull the words off the page and imagine it."

They want images, mood-boards, even a video of a couple of scenes (it worked for Getting On). Radio comedy is a well-trodden springboard to television: with comparatively minuscule budgets, it's readier to take a chance on a writer or an unusual idea.

Radio 4 comedy chief Caroline Raphael is happy to be that springboard, but warns: "We expect to see something written for radio." A distressing number of hopefuls send in scripts packed with camera angles and descriptions of scenery. As is so often, it's not what you can do, it's who you know: television is, Lumsden points out, "a collaboration -- writer, director, producer, actor".

Seek out people who share your sense of humour.

Raphael suggests finding out who's producing the shows that make you laugh: "If there's something about the tone, attitude, style you like, there's a better chance you will get on" -- important for sanity as well as success.

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It took Scanlan 16 years to the day from the first time she submitted an idea to her first commission: working with people she liked stopped her going mad. (And bear in mind, with that timescale you will need alternative means of making a living.)

Having finally got that sitcom commission: well, you've now made the first tiny step to getting your comedy on screen. The first essential of comedy isn't timing -- it's patience and self-belief.

In the end, Scanlan says, "If people aren't interested and you've exhausted every possible avenue -- you just have to find a new idea."

This article was first published in the April 2010 issue of WIRED magazine